YouTube and VEVO’s partnership to continue for the forseeable future

YouTube and VEVO will renew their partnership, according to YouTube’s chief in Japan and Korea John Hirai. There has been speculation that VEVO – the music video service owned by Sony and Universal Music, which licenses its own content and sells its own advertising, but which uses YouTube technology and gets a lot of its traffic via the Google-owned video platform – might look for a new technology partner once its current deal is up.

Though that always seemed unlikely, despite Sony Music boss Doug Morris – who spearheaded the launch of VEVO in his previous job running Universal Music – complaining earlier this year about Google’s fees. Aside from Google’s video player technology being amongst the best online, the benefit VEVO gets from having YouTube users sent in its direction when they search for music on YouTube remains hugely important, despite VEVO slowly building its own following.

And now Digital Music News reports that Hirai said at the recent MU:CON in Seoul: “There are some things that were written in the press that are not entirely true, because I’ve been involved in the negotiations myself, and what I can tell you is that I think you’ll see YouTube and VEVO continue to have a partnership for the next coming years”.

Asked how much of VEVO’s traffic comes via YouTube, rather than VEVO.com, Hirai added: “I don’t know the exact numbers but I think all of their viewcounts, including their website, I’d have to think a majority comes from YouTube”.